Quick hit: Twitter tracking tools and setup

Last night, my friend Nancy Goldstein asked me for some help* in tracking clicks and references in Twitter… and I thought, as I was laying out for her what I do, “man, this would be a good blog post.” Before we begin, though, let’s all repeat the first rule of Twitter: it’s not about you. It’s about the conversation. Being obsessive about ego-checking can breed an addictive, greedy ego-monster (not that I know from experience), so it’s important to remember why you’re doing this set up–not just so you can see people referring you, but also so you can monitor what’s happening in conversations that refer to things you care about.

Here are the tips I shared with Nancy:

Backtweets. Enter any URL and see who’s tweeted it, no matter what URL shortener they used. Especially handy if you don’t have access to analytics of a particular site. (RSS feed of results available)

Favstar. See who has favorited your tweets, and also new-style RT’ed your tweets. (RSS feed of results available– handy for seeing a old tweet that was recently favorited).

Advanced Twitter search. The search function at the top of Twitter home page doesn’t seem to have all of the results when referencing users. Go to http://search.twitter.com/ and enter your username preceded by the @ symbol (i.e., @randomdeanna) and hit enter. You should see results of when someone else new-style RT’s something with your username in it. (RSS feed of results available)

Other Twitter searches. I also have saved searches for deannazandt, which brings up both mistaken username mentions (people sometimes forget I’m @randomdeanna), as well links to my website, deannazandt.com. Plus a saved search for “Deanna Zandt,” when people read something I’ve written, but don’t know my twitter handle.

Got (free, easy) tips of your own? Feel free to share them in the comments!

(*UPDATE: Nancy reminded me to share with you that she is “the most selfless, confident, least ego-driven person you’ve ever met and would NEVER dream of checking my RT thread to reassure myself that people like me or are actually reading my work :)” OMG NANCY ME TOO)